this ain't no mortuary!

But it is a mitzvah tank! Spotted one Saturday night, circa 11pm... in Chinatown. Sort of a random place to look for wayward Jews, no? (in short, a mitzvah tank is a van, filled with orthodox jews, with a loudspeaker stuck on top. they go in search of secular jews to bully them into being more jewish and doing good deeds. this particular tank instructed the chinese on how to best celebrate hannukah.)

But there are more developments to report. Today I bought a goat! Or rather, half a goat. That brings my collection of half-owned things up to 3, the others being half of a whale and half of a saddle (no, not to be used on the 1/2whale). There might have also been a forgotten half couch and half toaster in there somewhere...

In other news, the current secretary of the treasury went to my high school, and owns a house in my itsy bitsy hometown of Barrington, IL. Well ok, the ritzy part of my hometown. Not sure how this Henry Paulson fella slipped under my radar for a whole 5 months.

And lastly, this quote, attributed to David Foster Wallace, is dead on:

"TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests."

That's from some irritating overachieving kid's blog, by way of the awesome and funny Marginal Revolution.

stop, thief!

Things reported missing from Spectrum offices in recent days:

1 set of computer speakers
1 sweater
1 1-gig flash drive
1 John Glenn action figure
1 orange

I, on the other hand, just received very nice coffee accoutrements from Sinterklaas. Dank je wel!



Hier is hij in Haarlem, zonder zein paard. Sinterklaasavonden waren altijd heel gezellig bij m'n ouders, in Overveen.

hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia

it's been a day for wonderfully big words.

this began with a friendly email exchange regarding the mark of the beast. I wanted someone to verify that my one-sentence description of the term was adequate. Along the way, I discovered the word hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia, or fear of the number 666 (the mark o' beast). I guess I missed a big moment in American history this summer when we safely navigated our way through June 6th, 06. Phew! I had no idea we were in danger, I was busy being censored in China. (umm link may not work. whatever. read the economist. it's good for you.)

And then came http://phobialist.com/
and several wasted hours contemplating fear. Christine avers she is overcoming a case of philophobia and still is afflicted with macrophobia. I may suffer from lutraphobia, not to mention a mild case of arachibutyrophobia. The ancients do continue to entertain.

cute or ugly?

Hard to say.

oh what's in a name

building on the Chronicles of Gabe, I decided to investigate supsun v. supson. I found G's deviantArt page, but it's not that interesting so I'm now dropping this creepy little game.

a psychedelic/lounge act cites these influences on his myspace page:

the morning a bit of dusk and a supson of midnight but only a supson as i'm scared of slugs eating all my lettuce and my, silver apples, fifty foot hose, syd barrett, cluster, the united states of america, the books, burt bacharach

A bit of poking around unearthed quite an extensive use of supson as a noun, both in English and French. It must have come from soupçon, meaning tad/little. Des supsons de chocolat, un supson de linkin park, un supson d'intelligence. Of all those, I'd like most to be rendered as a small chocolate statue. Possibly narcissistic, possibly demeaning, but definitely tasty. A good way to bring happiness to the world.

And since this is totally self-centered posting, here's a satellite photo of Wan Kio-supson, a very green place in Burma. I don't see your military juntas here!



In other news, Babs Bush junior was in my apartment Friday night (unbeknowst to me until much, much later). We talked about vodka tonics and pole dancing. Babs wishes she could pole dance, but she finds the moves difficult because her elbows get all shaky. I was like, I totally know the feeling.

The Chronicles of Gabe

It's been awhile since I've heard about Gabe, but the other day I received the latest installment. It hints that Gabe (aka, Gabeeeee, Mr. G, G-rawk) has relocated from San Francisco to Atlanta.

So goes the saga: during the summer of '05, I started receiving emails from random people, all addressed to Gabe, Mr. Gabis, G Money etc. None of it made any sense until one email explained the confusion--apparently Gabe's email address--for some unknown reason--is supsun@, one letter away from mine. A goodly number of his correspondents thought supsun was a weird choice and instead emailed me, explaining that "supson made more sense knowing u and ur gangsta talk." Sweet! I'm gangsta talk. Over the course of the emails I figured out that he was from Bozeman, Montana, that while there he had worked in a restaurant called O'Briens on Main Street, and that he was probably some sort of troubled youth who had been involved in the Big Sky Youth Empowerment Project, an outdoorsy program for underprivileged kids. He probably aged out of that program, and at some point he decided to up and move to San Francisco. That's when I started receiving his mail. I guess not too long after he got there--a month or so--he found himself in trouble.

That was all I heard--until now! In typical Gabe-friend style, the details trickle in.

Selected quotes:
"Gabe,
yo i got your last two phone messages... please know that i dont pick
up because my phone is turned off and i am usually in bed, last night i
was out at 8pm... gotta get my sleep because lily wakes up around 5
am.... anyway i will be around today so give a call or i will try
you... life sounds hard down there. Sarah, Lily and I will be in SF
this weekend so we better see you... also the Roots are playing at the
warfield on Sunday night and i was thinking about trying to make it
happen..."

(this was accompanied by two photos of Dude's very young kid (Lily, I guess) skateboarding.)

...and my personal favorite:

"what up g gabe gansta from bozone crib on main. man that’s some shit to deal with bro got u know man ive been some low places man. been places I didn’t know I was but sat and stared like I wasn’t. been places that I hold against my self for ever being in man been fuckin places so bad and so young its put crimps and ties I don’t even know how to undo. im stillin dealin with shit from my dui my mips my 4 mistermeners in less than two months goin court. they told me today that if I fuck up agiain im going to pine hills tell im 18 man. I always saw saw u has some one that has his shit more staright then mine some one who was always goin some ware no matter what was in front of him some one that was chill smart and fuckin somebody. never a fuck up dog jus some one in a postions whos going to have to work to get what he wants u know. I hope shit works out for you just some friendly words from a friendly friend back from home. don’t be down just be happy give me call
-jared"

I'd thought petty crimes were always female Miss Demeanors, but I guess sometimes Mister Mener rolls into town. Things must have turned out ok, because now:

"GABE! hi how are you?! sorry it took so long to email.
so i am going to atlanta this weekend! i'll be there on the 10th and
the 11th. i'll head back to atlanta the 11th (its a saturday). so
anyways what is your plans?! call me any time! good luck and good luv,
katie"

does this mean he's now in ATL? or why else would she think he cares that she's headed out there? For the most part I've been a good samaritan and told people they're emailing the wrong person, but I want to hear more! Gabe, I wish you well.
Or, as your friend Pete likes to say:
Be like the mountain
Flow like the river
Shine like the sun.

backyard

I suspect that the most horrifying part of the Amish murders is that the murderer is really a pretty ordinary guy. He was basically fully functional, able to lead a normal life with a job and a family. A lot of people have done things at age 12 or older that they since regretted deeply. This is not to trivialize the deaths of this young girls at all, but to recognize instead that crazy Americans aren't so hard to find.

The main thing standing in the way between people, their bad thoughts and action is bravery, if you can call it that. Maybe conviction is a better word. The ability to follow through on their desires. "Cowardice" is what keeps the numbers of homegrown terrorists (of the shoe bomber persuasion) and wild shooters down in the single digits.

School shootings are shockingly common, and, as David pointed out the other day, Michael Moore looked like an idiot when he tried to claim in Bowling For Columbine that events like that never happen in Canada. Montreal has had more than its fair share of shootings. The most horrifying and scarring, of course, was the shooting at Ecole Polytechnique in 1989, when 14 women were killed by a man who went through the school, yelling, "I hate feminists." Then there was the incident just recently in September (2006), when at least one woman died as a result of a shooting spree.

Good timing for Bloomberg to be on his national anti-gun campaign this fall.

oh yeah, forgot photo. view from Kawawa.

Kawawachikamach

Oh man. Still defrosting from this trip to the Naskapi Nation. Kamil(l)e had been staying with me a few days, so I'd spent minimal time preparing for the trip. Sunday morning we got up at 4:30, I tossed her in a cab to the airport an hour later, shoveled some clothes into a suitcase, then tossed myself into a cab at 6:30 and was on a train headed for montreal by 7:30. The following morning I met Rabih, David and Balgovind at the terminal as we waited for our Air Inuit flight to depart at 7am. We flew straight north, with a brief stopover at Quebec City. As we approached Schefferville, we flew over long stretches of yellow lichen-coated land, spiky little green and yellow trees divided by hundreds of little lakes and rivers. I had expected a more barren landscape, but the aerial view was stunning.

We landed around 10:30am and headed straight for the McGill Research Station, where we dropped off our stuff and became acquainted with the two very large and friendly dogs. An awesome little house--very co-op-y, full of pictures and mementos from students in the 70s and 80s. There used to be a huge iron mining operation in the area, and McGill conducted some sort of geological surveying at the time. But the mine was shut down in 1981-82, when it was declared unprofitable, and Schefferville effectively became a ghost town. Most of the white people left and money stopped flowing into the area. The research station has languished since then and feels partially stuck in the past.

From there we headed down the road to Kawawachikamach, to the Naskapi's band headquarters, where there were some network issues to resolve. Rabih and David installed a squid cache, got it up and running, and then we wandered back over to Schefferville for lunch at Bla Bla's. Everyone spoke French and/or Naskapi.

The evening wound down with a wonderful meal cooked up by Oksana, a history/science teacher at one of the two local schools who also maintains the research station and hosts random passers-through like us. The food situation worked out very well because Baugovin and David were also vegetarian. I had been worried about food (note PR's comment, "What will you eat out there, don't they just eat blubber??") and it was nice to have power in numbers with those guys. After dinner Rabih and David headed out with the spectrum analyzer to look for interference they thought was disrupting the satellite signal.

The following morning, up again at 5:30, the four of us and Barry, the Naskapi computer tech, drove out to Menihek, a tiny little settlement by a dam. HydroQuebec wanted internet and voip installed, and we were there to relocate a dish that had been put up on a previous trip (in June?). It was cold and extremely windy--I was wearing two pairs of pants, two shirts, two sweaters, two thick jackets and I was STILL freezing. Plus I looked pretty awesome staggering around like a giant puffball with wires hanging out of all my pockets. Headphones around my neck, a microphone in one pocket, recorder in another, camera dangling in front of me, notepad sticking out of another pocket. Ridiculous.

One day of hanging out on top of the Menihek dam, with the wind whipping unimpeded across the water, was plenty to wear everybody out. I took a break from watching Rabih and David in the afternoon and went for a walk. I followed the train tracks and watched the sun set across the water. Light rain fell intermittently, and rainbows popped up everywhere. We were staying with the hydro workers in a trailer-ish dorm, and we spent the evening sitting in the tiny dorm lounge, drinking and talking politics, religion, everything into the wee hours. It was very freshman-year. The following morning we woke up early and headed out for pre-dawn fishing at Balgovind's prodding. It was cold and we didn't catch anything, but casting the line out into the water and yanking it around so no fish would dream of biting was quite enjoyable.

Then it was time for breafast. I did a couple more radio interviews and B and I drove back to Schefferville.

I announced that the only disappointment of the trip was that I'd wanted to see a bear, so B and I drove around looking for some. We hadn't seen any in the forest as we drove back, so we swung over past the trash dump to see if we could spot one. No luck. But the osprey were out in full force; We saw several nests perched on the power line poles. We saw one osprey challenge another one that was sitting in a nest, and at one point the seated osprey took to the air and they chased each other, getting into an aggressive stand-off mid-air.

Back in town Ba;govind and Melissa, a Naskapi who also runs the computer center, and I went for lunch. B wanted me to try poutine, a Quebec specialty that consists of french fries smothered in gravy and cottage cheese. (or some sort of curdled cheese. or some white squishy kernels that we were told was cheese.)

Life in Kawawachikamach and Schefferville seems pretty rugged. There are fewer than 1,000 Naskapi out there and, even though it's beautiful and a good hunting area, it's so incredibly remote that flying is tremendously expensive because it's so hard to transport fuel up there. My plane ticket I think cost $1900 Canadian. There's a train that runs up twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays. If you want to order Chinese food, you call up the restaurant in Kuujjuaq, a slightly larger town further to the north, and they cook it up and put it on the train, and you get it a day or two later. For a special occassion the Naskapi sometimes order KFC from the south and it arrives on the train within a couple days.

Wednesday afternoon I boarded my flight back and that was that. I sat next to a geologist who spoke minimal English, and he humored me as I struggled through a conversation in French. He had spent his life repopulating the rivers up way, way north, at Kuujjuaq and Nunavit. He flew up for a month every year, spent time with the Inuit, and seeded the streams with char. I mentioned to him that the Naskapi had noticed that climate changes were changing the migration patterns of the caribou, which was problematic because their whole culture and lifestyle revolves around hunting caribou. He looked unimpressed and said that the Inuit up north were experiencing the same changes to the migratory circle of the caribou. But the Inuit had set up a GPS tracking system and could easily look up where the caribou were heading. Right. Of course they do, what was I thinking?

love, of all things (and music and landscapes)

self-indulgence ahead! It is sometimes difficult to draw the line between normal observations on life and the icky stuff of confessional prose. Toeing that line once again is this post on loving music and landscapes, effectively several paragraphs of metaphysical cotton candy.

Anyway, this began because a friend of mine said she found landscapes and music much easier to love than people, possibly because one can never completely possess either of them.

1. My first reaction was to think about what it means to love music/landscapes. My relationship with music I'm pretty clear on, the idea of loving a landscape had never occurred to me. And now, writing this, I wonder instead about this business of possessing another person. I think she actually used the word "own" but that word has strong overtones and I think is best left to the domains of consumerism and pets. I'd like to think that possession is an outdated concept pre-dating even our cavepeople days when you, the male cave dweller, kept your mate safely stowed away from other predatory males. So perhaps we're to some degree programmed to feel possessive about our mates, and maybe possession is an emotion that helps keep humans pair-bonded. (obviously pair-bonding either conferred survival benefit or was a secondary effect of some other habit that kept our hides attached to our bodies. No time for this dull topic here.) Humans are just such squirmy things that 'possession' in love is hard for me to conceptualize. Is there subservience involved? Accountability? How much control is inherent in possession? Disturbing territory.

But maybe that's just me.

2.How do you deeply love a landscape? By which I mean a living landscape, not a painting. What I like about them is that, counterintuitively, it’s not perspective that changes how you take it in—you can walk around it all you want, but that won’t make you fall in or out of love with what you see. It’s somehow a greater composite that immediately grabs your attention. But, to me, the moments of visual arrest pale in comparison to the most powerful moments of solitary engagement. Feeling the wind on one's face while standing on a sand dune. Or sitting on a rock and dangling one's feet in clear, shallow water. I guess I wonder how it can be love; to me a landscape is too ephemeral an experience to be a candidate for love. Can you love a landscape and not love a place? I suppose I'm not convinced that this experience is more than pleasure.

3. Music to me is rarely about emotion. Or, rather, I resent that music is quite often about emotion. When it is, listening becomes a form of torture, and the associations can end up so over-powering that the music itself becomes a secondary component of the listening experience. Except for Arvo Part’s Tabula Rasa, which in my opinion is as pure as emotion gets. (and why I almost never listen to it.)

I guess what I’m saying is there’s a point where deriving pleasure in music for music’s sake is overrun by the scenes/memories/possibilities that lyrics and chord progressions trigger, and I find it hard to lose myself in music the way that you can almost lose yourself in fiction. And this is why I love John Cage. I love that he tried to be about music in its least emotionally clogged form. Music to create delight. Every musician/composer shouldn’t be Cage, but Cage at least created one end of a spectrum on which we can consciously choose to slide as we gauge our emotional investment in music.

[side note: the biggest problem I have with music is that it’ll trigger some pleasurable reaction and I’ll forget to wonder whether it's anything I actually like. And then some day I’ll listen again, realize it was terrible, and get upset at myself for being slow to notice. It’s hard work to consciously listen, but it’s like eating canned soup rather than homemade. Still good, but ultimately eh.]

[I’ve also been eating a lot of canned (albeit organic) soups lately. So spinstery! Ick.]

More on the part of loving a landscape once I've got it figured out. It's not intuitive to me.

malddebokkwah syndrome

Scrambled thoughts ahead...

Reviewing my notes from an interview yesterday, I tried to decipher what I meant to type when I pounded out 'malddebokkwah syndrome'. I'm guessing it's some French term. Mal de boquois? Mal de bas quoi? Here's another French ambiguity. Let's say you're at a restaurant in France, how would you order fried apple?

Other things gleaned from a day of web browsing and sitting in long meetings: Tinnitis is exaccerbated by caffeine, regardless of how the tinnitis came about. So if one's ears are ringing from loud music, don't drink coffee. I guess it increases blood flow to the ears, causing blood vessels to constrict and... that's where my knowledge of ear function breaks down. Oh the senses. Ears do so much more than just hear things. I'm kind of surprised now that balance is not considered a sixth sense. The ability to determine uprightness given all these confusing stimuli like standing on squishy or uneven surfaces is sort of remarkable. Bending over doesn't make us topple. This should be surprising! All of this is maintained by the vestibular system, which consists basically of the inner ears and some piping. And since a damaged inner ear doesn't necessarily impact conventional hearing, I think it deserves its own honorary sense number.

To follow up on recent thoughts on how we adapt to new roles, here's Don DeLillo on executives playing at being executives:

“There’s a self-conscious space, a sense of formal play that is a sort of arrested panic, and maybe you show it in a forced gesture or a ritual clearing of the throat. Something out of childhood whistles through this space, a sense of games and half-made selves, but it’s not that you’re pretending to be someone else. You’re pretending to be exactly who you are. That’s the curious thing.”

I thought of this yesterday as I sat in a “state of the institute” meeting and several document manager-types gave speeches that were straight out of Dilbert. Except that there was no farce! How can that be? For contrast, when Spectrum staffers gave presentations, they wore tiaras and sashes. I was telling someone the other day about how I felt I was playing at being an adult by dressing too nicely. At what point does play cease to be play and just becomes reality? I am an adult, so in theory I can only excel at playing at being an adult. Playing at being something is the product of stereotype, which then legitimizes and propogates the stereotype itself. Children play at being children, too--for example, baby voice phenomena well past toddlerhood--but not to the exclusion of all other zany games. So is the antedote to becoming your worst nightmare (in this case a mid-level corporate paper shuffler) to play at being other things, too? Children don't stay children forever, eventually the teenager game wins out, and then the college kid game, and so on.

So, well beyond the world of College Self, I empathize with DeLillo's hypothesized panicking executive. We've forgotten how to pretend to be anything else. At this point, is it even possible to revisit a former game? If I walk home to my apartment on the prosaic upper west side thinking I'm a squirrel detective about to snuff out evil forces, will that make me more real? Whatever malddebokkwah syndrome is, this hall-of-mirrors tail-chasing makes a good candidate.

oh yeah, I forgot to mention this marks the rebirth of this blog.